When To Use Text Highlighter
Text highlighter questions show respondents a passage and ask them to select and tag specific spans of it. They are useful for message testing, ad or policy copy reactions, identifying which phrases in a stimulus drive agreement or concern, and lightweight qualitative coding done directly by respondents instead of by a research team after the fact.
Block Builder: Text Highlighter
Use text highlighter when which part of a passage stands out is the data. If you only need a reaction to the passage as a whole, pair a Content Block stimulus with a Grid Matrix or Slider follow-up instead.
How It Supports Research Design
- Passage: the stimulus text respondents highlight.
- Tags: color-coded categories respondents assign to each highlight (for example, Positive / Negative).
- Minimum and maximum highlights: require at least one highlight, or cap how many a respondent can create.
- Minimum and maximum highlight length: reject a selection shorter or longer than a configured number of characters, so a highlight stays meaningfully phrase- or sentence-sized rather than a single stray character or the whole passage.
- Allow overlapping highlights: off by default, so any new highlight replaces an existing one it overlaps regardless of tag. Turning it on lets highlights with different tags cover the same span, for designs coding a passage on more than one dimension at once (for example, tone and topic).
- Require every tag: the question isn't complete until every configured tag has been used at least once.
- Ask why for each highlight: off by default. When on, respondents can add a short optional note to each highlight explaining their reasoning, exported alongside the highlight itself. Notes have their own Character limit, Disable pasting, and Track pasting settings, and go through the gibberish and duplicate-text quality checks.
- Instructions: tell respondents how to pick a tag before highlighting and what counts as a highlight-worthy phrase.
Configure It In Domandata
Step 1: Open Block Builder. Open the survey and select the block where the stimulus reaction task belongs.
Step 1: Open Block Builder
Step 2: Add a Text Highlighter question. Choose Text Highlighter from the question type selector.
Step 2: Choose Text Highlighter question type
Step 3: Paste the passage. Use the exact stimulus text respondents should react to — the same considerations as any media or text stimulus apply here.
Step 3: Paste the passage
Step 4: Define tags. Add one or more color-coded tags respondents choose between before highlighting; a single tag works when you only need "what stood out," not why.
Step 4: Define tags
Step 5: Name and code it. Add a readable variable name so the exported highlight data is easy to locate.
Step 5: Variable Name
Step 6: Preview the highlighting interaction. Select a tag, then select text in the passage to confirm the highlight applies and can be removed by clicking it again. Every current highlight also lists underneath the passage with its tag, text, and a remove button — the non-drag way to review and remove a highlight, and how a respondent using a screen reader interacts with what they've highlighted instead of scanning colored spans visually. Respondents who can't make a drag-selection at all can turn on Accessible selection mode to build a highlight by choosing its start and end word from two dropdowns instead.
Step 6: Preview the highlighter
Preview: Try Text Highlighter
Text Highlighter: Respondent View
Select a tag and highlight text in the passage — the same interaction respondents use.
Data And Export Notes
Each highlight exports with the exact character span it covers in the authored passage, the tag applied, a snapshot of the highlighted text itself, and the respondent's optional rationale note when "Ask why for each highlight" is enabled. Because spans are tied to the authored passage, editing the passage text after collection starts can make earlier offsets harder to interpret.
Response quality automatically flags a couple of highlighting-specific patterns, with no setup needed: a single highlight covering almost the entire passage, and a respondent who reaches for only one tag across several highlights despite more being on offer. Both are heuristic signals meant to surface for review, not proof of inattention on their own. Instrument Review separately warns about settings respondents can never satisfy (a minimum number or length of highlights above the maximum, or Require every tag with a maximum too low to use every tag), nudges when a question offers more than one tag with no instructions explaining what distinguishes them, and flags an unusually long passage as a soft fatigue heuristic — there's no dedicated study on fatigue in highlighting tasks specifically, so treat that one as a suggestion, not a validated cutoff.